Admiral Hipper

Admiral Hipper was a German Kriegsmarine heavy cruiser which was launched on 6 February 1937 and commissioned on 29 April 1939. It was built at the Hamburg shipyards, and it was named for the World War I hero Franz von Hipper, who fought the British at the 1916 Battle of Jutland. The ship took part in the Norwegian Campaign, sinking HMS Glowworm in the process. In December 1940, she was deployed to the Atlantic Ocean to attack Allied shipping in the Battle of the Atlantic, and, on 31 December 1942, in the Battle of the Barents Sea, she sank a Royal Navy destroyer and a minesweeper before being damaged by two British light cruisers. Admiral Hipper was then ordered back to Germany and decommissioned for repairs, but it was never restored to operational status; Adolf Hitler even considered scrapping Admiral Hipper (having already done so with most of the other surface warships), but it was ultimately damaged beyond repair in a Royal Air Force bombing raid while it was docked at Kiel on 3 May 1945; the ship was then scuttled. She was raised in July and finally broken up for scrap from 1948 to 1952.